Mieke Vandenbroucke (Universiteit Antwerpen)

Late Modern globalization has led to a stark increase in the incidence of marriage and partner migration worldwide. In recent years, transnational marriage/partner migration as a form of family reunification has become a growing policy concern for EU migration governance as “the last loophole” in EU migration policy in face of a supposedly large and increasing number of sham relations through which the non-European spouse is able to obtain a residency permit (Wray 2006). As a consequence, as part of a restrictive turn in EU migration policy, several European governments have legislated legal-administrative investigations to determine whether a cross-border marriage/partner application is “real” or fraudulent (de Hart 2006). In these investigations, language plays a central role: applicant couples are interviewed and interrogated separately and repeatedly; linguistic mediation (e.g. the use of (non)professional interpreters or lingua francas) is resorted to for non-European applicants; and written records are produced in situ to document evidence. This makes these investigations highly complex discursive processes. In this talk, I discuss this pervasive, at times highly consequential role played by language and argue that discursive agency, i.e. the control that applicants have over the discourse produced by them and about them in the institutional investigation, is of crucial importance to guarantee fair and reliable outcomes. In doing so, I rely on ethnographic data gathered in the past years during investigations into possible sham relations conducted at several municipal offices in Belgium.